Track 3: Environmental Stewardship

291 derived dust from source to sea and assess its fate under varying seasonal conditions. By leveraging Lagrangian particle tracking methods, a well-established technique for simulating the dispersal of materials in fluid flow (Garnier et al., 2025)(Sebille et al., 2018),we can represent the transport of particles through the coastal ocean in tandem with their atmospheric deposition patterns on land. The resulting platform serves as a prototype land–sea digital twin, providing an interactive, high-resolution representation of how mining byproducts disperse through an island environment. Through this approach, we seek to support more comprehensive environmental impact evaluations and inform mitigation strategies that account for both terrestrial and marine vulnerabilities in the Galápagos and similar island settings. 2. METHODS 2.1 Overview of the proposed framework This study adopts an integrated land–sea modelling framework to evaluate the dispersion of quarry-derived particulate matter in a coastal island environment. The workflow consists of four main components: (1) seasonal analysis of wind characteristics using atmospheric reanalysis data; (2) definition of particle properties and estimation of initial sea-surface deposition locations based on wind conditions and gravitational settling; (3) numerical simulation of marine particle transport using a Lagrangian particle tracking model; and (4) visualization of the results within a three-dimensional geospatial digital twin environment. 2.2 Study area The target site is the Cerro Quemado quarry located on San Cristóbal Island, Galápagos Islands, Ecuador (approximately 0.92°S, 89.61°W). The quarry is situated within several kilometres of the coastline, allowing particulate matter generated during quarrying operations to potentially reach adjacent coastal waters through atmospheric transport and deposition. The island is influenced by trade-wind-driven atmospheric circulation and seasonally varying ocean currents associated with the Humboldt Current system and the Equatorial Countercurrent, making it suitable for investigating coupled land–sea dispersion processes. 2.3 Seasonal classification and dataset The seasonal classification in this study follows the criteria based on the annual cycle of sea surface temperature in the eastern equatorial Pacific (Hayes et al., 1989), and incorporates the refined definitions (Hartten & Datulayta, 2004). Atmospheric conditions were analyzed using the ERA5 reanalysis dataset provided by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF). Hourly wind speed and wind direction at 10 m above the surface were extracted for 2020–2024 from four grid cells surrounding the quarry site (longitude/latitude: −89.75, −1.00; −89.50, −1.00; −89.75, −0.75; −89.50, −0.75). To reflect

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